Gas Development

Concerning your editorial (Feb. 9), "Half an Offshore Loaf," I couldn't agree more with your position. The question of leasing in federal waters for oil and gas exploration and development should not be a take-it-and-love-it proposition as offered by Interior Secretary Donald Hodel in his recently announced five-year offshore development plan. Common sense dictates that each potential lease area should be examined individually, taking into consideration the environmental impact on air quality onshore, the potential for oil spills, as well as the opinion of the communities nearby, since they will have to live with the oil derricks.

Declaring that federal policies are wasting far more energy than could ever be pumped from oil and gas fields off the California coast, a parade of witnesses Wednesday urged a task force appointed by President Bush to push for a national energy policy that stresses conservation and development of alternative energy sources. The strongly worded pleas, combined with opposition to offshore oil and gas drilling by most of the state's ranking constitutional officers, came as the President's Outer Continental Shelf Leasing and Development Task Force pressed its review of controversial plans to open up millions of acres of offshore tracts to oil and gas development.

Benton Oil and Gas Co. said it has closed an agreement with the Tenneco/EnCap Gas Fund and a Norwegian bank that will give Benton access to a $15-million revolving credit facility. Benton, an independent oil and gas exploration company based in Oxnard, said it will use the credit facility to finance the ongoing development of its properties in Louisiana.

A 10-year moratorium on offshore oil and gas development along the Oregon coast won final passage in the Legislature on Thursday, though lawmakers stopped short of adopting a permanent ban. The bill extends a previous moratorium that had expired Jan. 2 for the three-mile-wide stretch of state coastal waters. There are few known oil resources offshore and no big push for exploration, but environmental, fishing and tourism groups pressed to extend the ban, fearful that the federal government could move to open waters farther offshore to drilling.

BP Amoco and Algerian state hydrocarbons firm Sonatrach signed a $2.5-billion deal to jointly develop Algeria's In Salah gas reserves, executives of the two firms said. BP Amoco will fund 65% of the development of the 200 billion cubic meters of gas over the next three decades and Sonatrach will contribute 35%, the firms said at the deal's signing ceremony Saturday in Algiers. "It is one of the two or three BP major investments in the world. . . .

In a victory for California and other coastal states, the House on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved legislation that would restore state veto power over federal oil and gas lease sales in the outer continental shelf. The measure, approved 391-32, would have the effect of overturning a 1984 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that stripped states of the authority to review federal oil and gas lease sales.

They are nature's own Greek chorus--plumed performers, dancing and chanting in a Dionysian frenzy, celebrating fertility, foreshadowing tragedy. Their own. It is dawn in the Jack Morrow Hills, a patch of pimples on the edge of Wyoming's Great Divide Basin, a mesmerizingly barren expanse of sage that one 19th century traveler said only "a mad poet" could love. Here, the strutting sage grouse flare their tails like peacocks in brown camouflage and croon their own love poetry.

Australia gave the green light today to Chevron Corp.'s plans for a major natural gas production and liquefication project off the country's northwest coast. The development of the Greater Gorgon fields is expected to provide huge quantities of liquefied gas for export to China and other Asian nations. Australia's environmental minister, Peter Garrett, told reporters in Canberra that the project received environmental approval subject to 28 new conditions, Bloomberg News reported.

In what would be the largest habitat zone ever established in the U.S. to protect a species from extinction, the federal government today proposed designating 200,541 square miles on the coast of Alaska as critical habitat for polar bears. Officials said the designation is not likely to further slow the pace of oil and gas development, and it crucially would not impose any controls to slow the biggest threat to polar bears, the melting of sea ice as a result of climate change. Those steps are crucial for polar bears but are being addressed separately in Congress through proposals to cap greenhouse gas emissions, said Tom Strickland, assistant Interior secretary for fish, wildlife and parks.